Consultant in Satellite Mission Design & Operations
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Short Biography
Dr. van der Ha received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, in 1977. Prof. Dr. Vinod Modi was his advisor.
From 1977 until 1998 he was at ESA's European Space Operations Center (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany. He worked as engineer, supervisor, and manager in support of many important ESA missions, e.g. Meteosat's, GIOTTO, HIPPARCOS, SOHO, HUYGENS.
In particular, he developed and implemented essential algorithms for long-term orbit evolution, relative motion, star pattern recognition, attitude determination and control, as well as for (HIPPARCOS) payload calibration, monitoring, and control.
From 1999 until 2003, he was at Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD, USA and charged with the design and operations support of the AOCS spin-mode of NASA's CONTOUR Mission. Although the satellite was lost during its injection into a trajectory to Encke’s comet, the spin-mode performances during the 6-weeks of phasing orbits were flawless.
From 2004 until 2006, he was at Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd., Guildford, UK as system engineer for commercial proposals covering the mission and system design of future satellites and constellations for application missions.
In 2006 he was appointed Full Professor for “Space Systems and Dynamics” at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan. In that role he supervised 7 PhD and 16 Master students and presented graduate-level lectures in attitude dynamics, determination and control, mission and satellite design, system engineering, and project management.
Since retiring from Kyushu University in 2011, he has been active as independent consultant in the field of solar and thermal radiation modeling for navigation purposes. The results of this work have been of particular relevance for a number of ESA, JAXA, and NASA deep-space satellites (e.g., Rosetta, Venus Express, IKAROS, and Messenger).
In collaboration with his colleague Frank Janssens, he established practical solutions for a few classical satellite dynamics problems. For instance, the stability conditions of a spinning satellite subject to axial thrust, internal mass motion, and damping have been formulated and interpreted. Furthermore, a novel and effective strategy for the flat-spin recovery of an unstable spinner under energy dissipation has been presented.
In October 2010 he was elected into the International Academy of Astronautics. He was invited to present the 20th John V. Breakwell Memorial Lecture at the occasion of the 65th International Astronautical Congress in Toronto on October 1st, 2014.
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ESA/ESOC Main Control Room (HIPPARCOS Operations, 1989)
Courtesy of ESA